Racist picture cropping in Newspapers raises its ugly head again
Thursday, January 10th, 2013 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_s_b
Lets play a game of spot the difference, gentle reader:
This photo is a picture taken by of Nick Clegg posing with an Incredible Hulk onesie given to him by Liberal Youth:
This photo is a picture used by the Torygraph to illustrate a non-story about one of the people who spoke to Nick Clegg on his radio phone in being a Lib Dem activist:
Now, I am sure that the Torygraph just cropped the picture to make the composition better and to make it fit better into the column, and the fact that this has resulted in the black guy and the guy with long hair being cropped off is just a side effect and not a intended consequence, but it does fit into an unfortunate narrative of people who are not white/male being cropped out of photos or replaced in them - and not just by newspapers.
Examples:
http://gawker.com/5027666/sun-throws-pr
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8221896.stm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/0
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/f
What makes the unfortunate cropping worse is that the black guy in the photo of Nick Clegg with his onesie is the guy who asked him to pose with the onesie in the first place, m'friend'n'colleague Lance. They wouldn't even HAVE the picture of Clegg with his blasted onesie if it hadn't been for one of the people they cropped out. What a bunch of plonkers.
This photo is a picture taken by of Nick Clegg posing with an Incredible Hulk onesie given to him by Liberal Youth:
This photo is a picture used by the Torygraph to illustrate a non-story about one of the people who spoke to Nick Clegg on his radio phone in being a Lib Dem activist:
Now, I am sure that the Torygraph just cropped the picture to make the composition better and to make it fit better into the column, and the fact that this has resulted in the black guy and the guy with long hair being cropped off is just a side effect and not a intended consequence, but it does fit into an unfortunate narrative of people who are not white/male being cropped out of photos or replaced in them - and not just by newspapers.
Examples:
http://gawker.com/5027666/sun-throws-pr
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8221896.stm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/0
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/f
What makes the unfortunate cropping worse is that the black guy in the photo of Nick Clegg with his onesie is the guy who asked him to pose with the onesie in the first place, m'friend'n'colleague Lance. They wouldn't even HAVE the picture of Clegg with his blasted onesie if it hadn't been for one of the people they cropped out. What a bunch of plonkers.
